Thursday, April 13, 2017

The problem with being 100% Māori.

Māori TV’s
programme ‘Native Affairs’ recently ran a story which followed up on a story
about ‘Māori identity’ they aired in 2016. A presenter who appears regularly on
the programme undertook an Ancestry.com DNA test, and in the story this week
her results were released: she is 100% Māori! As soon as this news is announced
by the white Ancestry.com scientist, the presenter beams and raises her hands
in the air triumphantly. She has won! She has overcome! Something in her saliva
told a commercial geneticist something which she didn’t know about herself
before! In a follow-up piece published by The Guardian, she describes her own daughter reading about the outcome of the
test online and responding with similar glee: “My daughter... stormed my room
this morning brimming with pride.”

The
problem with race and blood

The story aired
on Native Affairs opens with a series of clips about race, including Hitler
addressing a large rally, and an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jnr’s famous
‘I have a Dream’ speech. In this way, the story is positioned as part of a
global story of oppression on the basis of race. At one point in the story,
this focus on race is localised as the presenter considers a series of
anti-Māori claims in New Zealand which hinge on the idea that there are ‘no
real Māori’ left anymore. The logic goes that if there are no Māori people then
there is no reason for Māori rights of any kind, which on the face of it feels
racist, and certainly it emerges from the same historical context as the kind
of racism alluded to in the Hitler and King clips. And absolutely Māori people
have been, and continue to be, subjected to racism in many forms.

However,
the idea that ‘there are no real Māori people left’ is a specific kind of
claim: the ‘elimination of the Native’ (as Patrick Wolfe put it) relies on a
particular colonial anti-Indigenous logic. Once Indigenous people are removed,
land and other resources become available. This removal has taken various forms
over time. In all colonies, albeit to varying degrees, the removal of
Indigenous people has taken place through violence: massacres, armed warfare,
genocide, deliberate acts of starvation and disease, and so on.In some places, most notably Australia,
Indigenous people were legally assumed to not exist (and so the continent
became British on the basis of terra nullius which means there was noone there
before). In other places, Indigenous people have been physically removed (as in
the major forced migrations undertaken in the US of many Indigenous nations in
the nineteenth century, including what is now known as the Trail of Tears). And,
in many settler colonies in which the pesky Indigenous folks refuse to be
physically exterminated, claims about Indigenous disappearance morph into the cultural
realm: ‘real Māori people’ shouldn’t speak English, occupy postions in the
middle class, live away from the pā, etc etc etc.

But one of
the other ways that Indigenous people have been removed has been through a very
powerful story: a story in which the passing of the last Indigenous person is
widely mourned or celebrated. These ‘lasts’ are found all over the map:
Truganniny the ‘last’ Tasmanian, Tommy Solomon the ‘last’ Moriori, Ishi the
‘last’ of his tribe in California; often their bodies (living or not) have been
displayed and paraded publicly. Focusing on ‘lasts’ is actually a good strategy
if you are trying to acquire Indigenous land and resources. All you need to do
is come up with a definition of ‘Indigenous’ which is ever-shrinking, and this
is where blood quantum comes in. Each of the ‘lasts’ noted above were known for
being the last ‘full-blood’ person of their community, an idea which suggests
an Indigenous community only exists as long as there are individuals who are
‘purely’ (yep, 100%) Indigenous.

The idea
that blood is able to be divided into fractions is only able to be understood
as a metaphor. Countless people have reflected (some hilariously, some
devastatingly) on the problem of imagining that blood can be drained from an
individual and sorted into separate bottles by racial type. And yet, the idea
that people can be half something and quarter something else is a powerful
metaphor, and one which is used against (and in some cases by) Indigenous
communities in many places. For years, New Zealand census data listed Māori people
as full-blood, half-castes and quarter-castes. Wherever it is used, you can
trace the blood quantum back to land and resources: in Hawai’i, for example,
Hawaiian homestead land can only be inherited by people who have at least 50%
Hawaiian ‘blood,’ a situation which has pretty bleak implications for
individuals making decisions about family and partnerships. (See Kehaulani
Kauanui’s book Hawaiian Blood for the backstory and analysis.) The idea
that ‘blood’ can be sorted into fractions contains its own mathematical trap:
as one of my students put it several years ago, ‘you can only lose Indigenous
blood.’Colonialism and claims of race and
blood have played out in opposite ways for enslaved and Indigenous people:
while the colonial project benefits from enslaved people of African descent to
never ‘lose’ their blackness (because otherwise they would revert from property
to humans), it simultaneously benefits from Indigenous people being incapable
of retaining (or at least, being able to claim) indigeneity.

The story
of blood quantum underpins constant bubble of questions in New Zealand about
whether there are any ‘real’ Māori left, which in turn are underpinned by an
assumption that there are not. This is a useful strategy for people who want to
make contemporary anti-Māori claims, because it allows them to simultaneously
acknowledge prior Indigenous presence
while insisting on current Indigenous
absence. (This duality, of course, both updates and draws on the ‘smoothing the
pillow of the dying race’ colonial claims of the late nineteenth century.) It
feels tempting to challenge the claim there are no ‘real’ Māori left by producing
an example of a ‘real’ Māori. ‘See,’ some people on social media have agreed
with the TV presenter, ‘there are some full-blooded Māori out there! So now
those racist people can stop saying there aren’t any!’ But like attempts to ‘disprove’
stereotypes by proving their opposites (eg by producing a sober Māori person for
someone who claims all Māori are drunks), this approach to colonialism fails to
understand that the original colonial claim (eg that there are no ‘real’ Māori
left) is not operating according to logic; rather than nodding the head and
saying ‘aha! I see! There are real
Māori people left after all!,’ the claim will keep shifting to enable a claim
to be made about Indigenous absence. The way to challenge stereotyping, and the
way to challenge claims of Indigenous absence, is not to disprove them by
proving their opposites. Instead, it is only possible to challenge them by
pulling them apart: by understanding their history, by understanding their
deeper claims, and by refusing to engage with them as logical (and, thus, ‘disprovable’)
arguments.

Saying “I
am 100% Māori” reinforces, rather than undermines, a claim that there are no ‘real
Māori’ left: it allows the logic underpinning a colonial argument about blood
quantum and ‘purity’ to remain unchallenged. (And, irresponsibly, it implies
something about Māori people who would not receive 100% certification from
Ancestry.com – triumphantly putting one’s hands in the air quietly suggests how
less-than-100% Māori people should respond.)

The
problem with genes and science

When I
posted the story on my facebook newsfeed, someone I don’t know wrote a fairly
lengthy reply which assumed I (and others commenting) had not actually watched
the Native Affairs story or read the accompanying article. But, more
concerningly, the person assumed that the ‘science’ peddled by commercial
organisations like Ancestry.com is beyond question. The percentages and their
associated claims offered by the TV presenter and Ancestry.com were repeated by
this stranger as a kind of ‘truth’ about which I was having an inappropriate
response. But what kind of ‘truth’ can a saliva test at Ancestry.com tell?

There are
(at least) two answers: one is that a wide range of experts have weighed in on
the limitations of this kind of genetic testing; and another is that (a little
like engaging with blood quantum) it is important to take a step back and ask a
broader set of questions about the uses of western science against Indigenous
people.

It is
simply not possible for a single genetic test to make a set of claims about the
DNA of a single individual: these tests either trace the mitochondrial DNA
(mother’s mother’s mother etc) or the Y chromosome (which the TV presenter
would not possess if she is genetically female. And so, any one test can only trace,
and thus account for, a particular lineage. But, more broadly, the important
thing about genetic testing for ‘ancestry’ is that there is no single genetic
marker which is found in, and only in, each respective community. Instead,
companies like Ancestry.com compile all the results of all of the people who
have done tests with them and line these up with the claims these people make
about where they are from. This allows them to build up a series of genetic
markers which they suspect is more likely to be found in a particular large
grouping of people. The presenter is advised her DNA contains a certain percentage
(98%/ 100%) of ‘Polynesian’ genes – there is no specific genetic marker for
being Māori. There is nothing about the presenter’s genes which say ‘this
person is Māori’ as much as there appear to be similarities between the DNA
found in her saliva and the DNA foud in saliva contributed by other people who
claim to be Polynesian. The idea of specific genetic percentages is itself as
metaphoric as fractions of blood.

What does
98%, or 100%, actually mean? It is a scientifically impossible yet
easily-extrapolated claim based on a set of claims about being based in science
which is itself dubious (or, at best, extremely limited). Then why would it
feel like ‘truth’ to the stranger who wrote on my facebook wall and, indeed to
the presenter? Because we are constantly told a series of stories about science
as a (neutral, unchallengeable, simple) arbiter of ‘truth’ – and the
interesting thing is that genetic science is just the latest in a long, long
history of science being used in order to reinforce colonial claims about
Indigenous people. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
scientists pulled out measuring tapes and metal instruments to record the
dimensions of skulls, limbs and other body parts in order to produce a picture
of humanity in which people could be sorted into racial types. It can be easy
to blindly accept the ‘science-ness’ of genetic testing in the early 21st
century even as we imagine we would never be fooled by truth claims about
racial difference (and racial hierarchies) made by this kind of ethnographic science
of a century ago.

We’ve seen
this all before, of course: certain kinds of science being used in order to
prove ‘once and for all’ truths about Indigenous people for which Indigenous
people already have complex explanations. The history of human migration across
the Pacific region, for example, has been carefully preserved by people across
the region in oral traditions, songs, dance, material culture, technologies, and
so on. For generations, Europeans have sought to ‘prove’ things about human
migration across the region through various strategies which claimed to be the ‘final’
word on that migration because it was
scientific. The most recent version of this has, of course, been genetic
science: the tracing of history through DNA tests which gained some wider
interest around a decade ago, such as through the popular 2006 documentary. The opening words of the documentary? “In New Zealand,
we all come from somewhere else.” While Māori people have no problem discussing
and celebrating our migration histories in most contexts, it seems striking
that these opening words gently reinforce the idea that Māori have no special or
particular relationship with New Zealand. The elimination of the Native indeed.

No, the
point here is not that Māori don’t have ancestral connections across the Pacific
region. The point is that we allow ‘science’ to make a set of claims about us
that are presented as if there is a ‘truth’ that science has access to which
our other accounts of who we are simply cannot grasp. A claim about Māori
lineage accompanied by a mathematical expression like ‘98%’ feels more ‘true’
than other kinds of claims.

We also see
it elsewhere: genetic science (and especially commercial enterprises like
Ancestry.com, although they are by no means the only players in this
marketplace) being used in order to ‘prove’ or delegitimate all kinds of
Indigenous claims of connection and heritage. Among others, the Indigenous
Studies scholar Kim TallBear has written and spoken widely about this in the
context of North America (especially in her book Native American DNA); she problematizes the science, but also the
ways in which this ‘science’ is used in, as well as against, Indigenous communities
in order to undermine (to trump, if you will) other claims of connection and
belonging which have worked for millenia. She has also explicitly responded to
claims made in ads for these genetic ancestry companies in which people ‘discover’
they have a certain percentage of what is described as Indigenous ancestry. Interestingly,
there is a link between the anti-black racism alluded to by the footage of MLK
at the beginning of the Native Affairs story: these genetic ancestry companies
have also built up a large market among the African American community,
providing ‘answers’ to questions about African origins which centuries of
enslavement have rendered irretrievable. It seems Ancestry.com has figured out
all of our weak spots.

These comments about science and colonialism are not themselves anti-science. They are, instead, comments about the ways in which we should hold science to the same accountability we hold any other source of information, and we should not get all distracted by the truth claims made by people who spit out percentages despite their scientific method being widely critiqued. Responsible scientists working in the area of genetics would presumably clarify the limitations as well as possibilities of any claims they make.

The
problem with colonisation

So then, why would a TV presenter who publicly demonstrates her grounding
and proficiency in Māori language and culture feel so triumphant about someone
telling her (yes, on the basis of fuzzy science) she is 100% Māori? Why would she
report on a global news site that her daughter is just as thrilled? What is it
about all of the things she already knows about who she is (tribally,
linguistically, culturally) that they feel insufficient when compared to the ‘truth’
offered by the man from Ancestry.com? How can a percentage derived from questionable
commercial science be such a source of pleasure?

Why would something posing as ‘journalism’ fail to draw on any analysis
of the ways in which blood quantum has historically, and continues to be
globally, used in order to undermine Indigenous people? Why would it fail so
spectacularly to challenge rather than reinforce the colonial logics of blood
quantum, even as it attempts to gesture to the problematic way that a story of ‘no
real Māori anymore’ is used to challenge Māori people? And, why would a TV show
which purports to centre ‘Native’ affairs, screened on a TV channel which
purports to centre Māori perspectives, be prepared to provide free and
uncritical advertising for a specific company?

The Kenyan writer and scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o has famously spoken about
what he calls the ‘colonisation of the mind,’ and the ways in which decolonisation
is not just a political or singular act but an emotional, psychological and
ongoing process.

We already have our own ways of knowing who we are: they are connected to
the transformative, complex and dynamic concept of whakapapa. I hope that one
day we will feel more confident about making a set of claims about who we are –
not just ‘factually’ - but according to our own logics.

Sadly, but surely obviously, you can’t have it both ways: you can’t claim
to be undermining the damage done by claims about disappearing Natives while
presenting yourself as Native #1.

You can’t fight blood quantum with blood
quantum. But you can fight it with whakapapa.

I didn't want to read this - it looked too long - but couldn't stop. Thank you for this critique and analysis. I hadn't considered some of the points you identified, it made me look deeper. Fantastic piece of critical writing 😊

Really, truly wonderful expose on why it is fundamentally inadequate to rejoice in the science of DNA when it comes to cultural belonging. I felt for that journalist the pain behind her exultation. Thank you for your words.

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